Vietnam Veterans Memorial display opens with ceremony

7:30 p.m. — Candlelight ceremony with musical performances, a POW/MIA ceremony, keynote speaker John Hosier and lighting of candles. Afterward, the reading of names of those inscribed on the wall will resume.

Sunday

2 p.m. — Concert featuring Join the Band and the rock band Bridge of Sighs, with Chumash Indian dance performance.

The three-quarter-scale traveling replica of the permanent Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., will be open to the public 24 hours a day through the holiday weekend until 11:30 a.m. Monday. The memorial park is at 5600 Lindero Canyon Road.

For the opening event, hundreds of chairs set out for the ceremony stood empty.

"I would have loved to have seen more, but I am confident that the ones who wanted to be here were here and hopefully over the next couple of days we'll get more people to come," said Daniel Smith, chairman of the board of directors of the Memorial Honor Detail, which hosted the event.

"Filling the seats does not necessarily make it a successful thing. When you see the faces of people who really want to be here, even one or two, then it's mission accomplished," said Riverside resident Smith, 66, who served two tours in Vietnam with the U.S. Marine Corps

The opening ceremony included a posting of the colors, the laying of wreaths for each branch of the U.S. Armed Forces and a flyby by a restored UH-1N Huey helicopter. Participating were members of the Los Angeles County and Ventura County fire departments, active-duty and retired military personnel and local dignitaries.

Keynote speaker Gill Gallo, director of the Riverside National Cemetery, spoke of the sacrifice of those who served in Vietnam.

"The individuals we honor here today did what they were asked to do, they did it to the best of their ability and they paid the ultimate price," Gallo said. "This traveling wall has impacted millions of lives across the nation. It is unique in many ways. It is not dedicated to any one person but instead to an entire generation."

One of the first to find a name they recognized on the wall was Wayne Sutterfield, whose friend Craig Williams, a graduate of Bellflower High School in 1965, perished in Vietnam in 1969 at the age of 21.

Sutterfield, who lives in Oxnard, said it meant a lot to find Williams' name on the memorial replica.

"I was with the 173rd Airborne in Vietnam, and I haven't made it to Washington yet so it brings back a lot of memories. Craig was a super athlete, and he was the most popular guy in school," he said.

Eugene Lemmond of Simi Valley, a Vietnam-era veteran, was looking for the name of Walter Lemmond, a relative who died in Vietnam.

When he was asked what it meant to him to visit the wall and make a pencil rubbing of Walter's name, emotion overcame him. Composing himself, he said: "At least they didn't forget. There are 58,000 names here and this was a war that nobody wanted, and we all did our duties and at that time the country didn't appreciate it."

More than three times the number of those who died in Vietnam have taken their own lives since coming home, Smith said, and more than one-third of the homeless in America are veterans.

"By bringing the wall to a local community we get to share just by going up and touching or reading a name, so it's quite important in the healing process, and that's what we're looking for, to heal and to never forget," he said.